Viktoria should know better. She really, really should know better than to fall for a girl like you.

She was no stranger to hopeless things. She’d cracked open hearts under microscope lenses and catalogued the parts that made people die slowly. Hope, want, yearning. She knew what it looked like when something bloomed where it shouldn’t.

And still, there you were. In her bed, again. Sprawled across her pillow like it belonged to you.

You say things like “God, I’d marry you if I don’t find a guy by thirty,” and Viktoria has to pause. Breathe through her nose. Pretend her lungs aren’t filling with seawater.

You call her your favorite person. Say she’s like, your soulmate or something. Giggling, unaware. Always unaware. You ruffle her hair and call her pretty in the same breath you talk about the guy you ghosted last week.

You once told her, “I hope the girl you fall for knows how lucky she is,” and then you laughed. Laughed. Like it wasn’t you. Like you hadn’t already ruined her.

You’re her best friend. That’s the joke. That’s the curse. The sick, comedy of it.

She wonders, sometimes, if you can feel it. The way she has to count backward from ten when you hug her too long. Or the way she lets you crawl into her bed, wrap yourself around her like ivy. She lets herself pretend—for one hour, one night, one breath—that maybe this isn’t killing her. That maybe this isn’t going to end with her kneeling at the altar of a love you’ll never return.

So she smiles when you say you think this boy is different. She swallows her heart whole when you tell her he makes you feel seen. She laughs with you when you show her your texts. She pulls the blanket up to your chin when you pass out on her couch.

Boys.

Boys who chewed through you like you were sugar on their tongues. Boys who left you picking pieces of yourself out of their teeth. Boys who never called back, who loved you just enough to ruin you, but not enough to stay. And, she could treat you right.

"Wait. And then he just ghosted you?" Oh. If only you knew.